Things to Read on the Morning of January 24, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Barry Eichengreen: Time to get serious about bank reform: After the financial crisis, governments staved off a second Great Depression – too well. This triumph let them duck tough reforms
• David Edwards: GOP Rep. Tom McClintock: Keep minimum wage low ‘for minorities’ who aren’t worth more than $7 an hour
• John Kasich: Medicaid Expansion
• Dan Lyons: Unicorn Bloodbath: VC Bill Gurley Sounds The Alarm, Again
• Cory Doctorow: GOP senator Joni Ernst who boasted about her family’s self-reliance received $460K in federal subsidies

1. Barry Eichengreen: Hall of Mirrors [Audio] :: London School of Economics :: Public lectures and events

2. Chris Mooney: The Midwest’s climate future: Missouri becomes like Arizona, Chicago becomes like Texas: “The bipartisan trio of climate risk prognosticators for the business community–Michael Bloomberg… Hank Paulson, and… Tom Steyer–are back…. A higher prevalence of extremely hot temperatures could severely impact corn and wheat production, the report warns, unless we take serious evasive action…. By 2100… the more likely range for losses, says the document, is 11 to 69 percent…”

3. Mark Wilson: The Upshot: “That’s the power of The Upshot, an online news and data visualization portal on the New York Times’ website… entrust[ed]… to the paper’s former Washington bureau chief and economics columnist David Leonhardt…. To Leonhardt, The Upshot is more of a laboratory where he can lead a team of 17 cross-disciplinary journalists to rethink news as something approachable and even conversational. The goal: to enable readers to understand the news and by extension, the world, better. publisher. But we live in the puppy-GIF era…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Danielle Kurtzleben: How working women, cheap cars, and Starbucks killed carpooling
• David Corn: “Romney appears to have been body-snatched—perhaps by the ghost of Ted Kennedy…. What’s next? Supporting gay rights, gun control, and abortion rights? (Or, in his case, going back to supporting gay rights, gun control, and abortion rights)…”:
• The Earl Grey Tea House
• Tim Urban: The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence

1. Orin Hatch: Why the Plaintiffs in King Are Wrong: “A third constitutional defect in this ObamaCare legislation is its command that states establish such things as benefit exchanges, which will require state legislation and regulations. This is not a condition for receiving federal funds, which would still leave some kind of choice to the states. No, this legislation requires states to establish these exchanges or says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will step in and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government.”

2. Lizardbreath: Back On The Veldt, People Who Didn’t Attribute Innate Personality Differences To Gender Were All Eaten By Wolves. What Were Wolves Doing On The Veldt? Who Can Tell?: “The Atlantic… an article… ‘The Secret To Smart Groups: It’s Women’. Researchers… quantifying the ‘intelligence’ of small groups… found… it was less strongly related to the individual intelligence of the group members than the average… capacity to understand what other people are feeling…. Women are on average better at social sensitivity…. Look: I completely believe that social sensitivity is terribly useful in making a group accomplish anything…. I’m also perfectly ready to believe that women are on average much better at it. But come on…. If you want a smarter group, you want more socially sensitive members, not more women… just choosing women blindly isn’t–I know some deeply socially insensitive women…. The researchers themselves say this kind of sensitivity is a learned skill…. Could the headline of the article maybe be about how this is a skill people should be focusing on improving, rather than about how one gender is just better at it than the other? Feh. (It is kind of relaxing, for once, to come up with a stereotypical gender difference where I personally come up feminine, though. While I’m deeply socially awkward in general, I kick ass at… ‘what emotion is this set of eyes expressing’… I do spend a fair amount of time at work massaging other people’s states of mind so as to keep the work progressing…)”